


Green, Green Grass of Home

by istia



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence, Episode Tag, Episode: s05e16 Brain Storm, F/M, POV Rodney McKay, POV Ronon Dex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-11
Updated: 2012-04-11
Packaged: 2017-11-03 12:08:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/381193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/istia/pseuds/istia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A coda to Brain Storm in which actions have consequences. Goes AU after the episode.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Green, Green Grass of Home


       It's good to touch the green, green grass of home
    
       Then I wake and look around me
       At four grey walls that surround me
       And I realise I was only dreaming....
    
           --Tom Jones, Green, Green Grass of Home, 1966

Without bothering with the door chime, Rodney walked straight into Sheppard's quarters, already talking because _honestly_ \--

"I always suspected Woolsey was the IOA's toady at heart--though I really thought he'd gotten some loyalty to Atlantis in his time here, but I guess a leopard, spots, whatever--but I can't _believe_ he's actually going along with them!"

"Hello to you, too." Sheppard's laconic voice derailed him momentarily, the way Sheppard's voice weirdly often did. Sheppard was sitting on his bed holding a golf club, feeling it up in that disturbing way he had.

"Yes, hello, social niceties, can we get back to the important matters now? Such as Woolsey siding with the IOA and the whole lot of them on a mission to _destroy_ me!"

Sheppard put the club on the bed and got up, moving with his lanky grace to the small fridge Rodney had wired in for him. Sheppard extracted a six-pack, grabbed his jacket, and said, "How 'bout we move this outside?"

Rodney managed to contain himself on the quick trip via transporter out to the isolated pier only they seemed to use, content he'd soon have Sheppard's complete attention and support. They'd fought Wraith! And Replicators! And won! Woolsey and the IOA, _bah_.

When they were seated and Sheppard handed him a cold beer, Rodney pulled open the tab and took a long drink, too preoccupied to taste more than the coolness, which was a benefit given Sheppard's execrable taste in beverages.

Rodney took a deep breath. "So, everything worked out fine in the end, catastrophe diverted, only one major injury--and that was entirely Tunney's fault for trying to do something he was incapable of fully understanding in the first place. But--did you hear this?--the IOA has--" he lifted his left hand to draw ironic quotes in the air "--'concerns' about my actions. Concerns about my actions! While I was, you know, saving the day!"

He turned to look at Sheppard and met a sympathetic gaze. He swallowed, his throat suddenly tight, at the rock-solid dependability of Sheppard's being here, next to him, backing him. Exactly as he'd expected and been counting on when he'd stormed from Woolsey's office and headed on automatic straight to Sheppard, as he'd learned he could over the past five harrowing, exhilarating years. Years neither Woolsey nor any of the IOA jerks had more than the most cursory knowledge, and no understanding, of.

A wave of calm swept over him with Sheppard's solid warmth beside him; at knowing Sheppard had his back. The simple fact of Sheppard's being beside him was more effective in helping him regain balance than all of Beckett's lectures over the years on controlling his emotions for the sake of his blood pressure and Teyla's attempts to teach him meditation and Ronon's lessons on focusing had ever managed. Bizarre, but that's the way these recent years had shaped his life.

He took a deep breath and another swallow. "So," he said more quietly, "that idiot Woolsey is actually giving serious consideration to the IOA's demands that my role in the SGC be re-evaluated. That my _place_ here on Atlantis be examined and possibly redefined! There's even talk of reassigning me back to Earth permanently. Can you believe this? Are those IOA morons eating peyote buttons or have they just reached collective senility together?"

Sheppard cracked a grin with a waggle of his eyebrows, then tilted his head back to take a long swallow, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat. Sheppard sat at rest then, the can cradled in his lap as he stared out at the vast undulating beauty of the ocean surrounding them on the planet they'd unofficially dubbed New Lantea. Sheppard's smile had fallen away, leaving him looking tired and pared-down, the lines around his eyes and the gray hair at his temples starkly apparent in the bright noon light. Rodney pulled his eyes from Sheppard's profile and followed his gaze.

"Yeah, so there's that." He let his shoulders slump as some of the fury dissipated. "I'll probably have to go to the SGC to defend my position here--god, the ridiculous waste of time makes my head hurt!--unless we can talk some sense into Woolsey." Feeling suddenly uneasy in Sheppard's long silence, he added tentatively, "Did Woolsey mention I might be away?"

Sheppard nodded, sighed out a breath, and turned to him. The corners of Sheppard's mouth were curled up and his eyes were direct as always, but Rodney finally became aware enough to see the tension in Sheppard's body and an odd tightness around his eyes that made those incipient lines of middle age seem deeper than usual.

"You knew?"

"Woolsey told me about the possibility."

"You knew." Tension seeped into his muscles, his shoulders straightening and back going rigid. "You didn't tell me. What, it slipped your mind? The possibility I might be fired was less important than, I don't know, polishing your golf clubs?" He clamped his lips together as his voice approached the squeaky register, and felt the soft metal of the can give way under his thumb.

Sheppard shrugged a shoulder. "I was reviewing the reports. Ronon and I got back after you, you know."

Sheppard's eyes were shadowed in the hard light. Maybe the camping trip was why Sheppard looked so damned exhausted? Who knew what death-defying feats he and Ronon had got up to. The two of them alone together were a menace, mostly to themselves, which meant mostly to Sheppard since he had more than a decade on Ronon, but still kept trying to compete. The idiot.

Sheppard mustered a smile, though, and bumped his shoulder. "Anyway, it looks like everything turned out okay in the end, right? The machine was turned off, nobody died. Just one major injury, even."

"Yeah, the poor guy hit with the freeze-lightning. Looks like he might survive, though he's lost his arm and leg and is on the list for various organ transplants. Hooked up to machines at the moment, but, uh...alive."

He fumbled to a stop, unable to use the word "lucky" that Jennifer had. He twirled his free hand in the air and Sheppard nodded in understanding. Sheppard was easy like that.

After a moment, Sheppard said, "And Keller's okay. You saved her."

"Yes. She was dead, you know?" He met Sheppard's eyes, unable to entirely quell a waver in his voice as he relived the panic of those frantic minutes. "She wasn't breathing when I found her. I had to use an _ax_ to chop through a door to get to her, then I had to bring her back to life. She was soaking wet, freezing." He shuddered. "We came this close to losing her." He lifted his hand and drew his thumb and index finger close together.

He stared at his familiar fingers, his large, square hand. He'd brought Jennifer back to life with these hands and his mouth and the warmth of his body. He felt an echo of the vast relief he'd felt when she'd coughed and opened her eyes.

"You saved her, buddy." Sheppard's voice was like a wash of warm water.

Rodney grinned. "I did. Thank god."

"Yeah." Sheppard smiled. "Losing her would've been hard."

Rodney shook his head, sobering. He stared sightlessly out across the water. "I can't imagine what I'd do if I lost her." He'd said something similar to Jennifer in that ghastly freezing corridor when she woke up, when she'd come back to him. The words kept echoing in his head in quiet moments, along with the terror of those moments when he'd found her not breathing.

After a silence, Sheppard said tonelessly, "Right."

Rodney snapped back to the infuriating matter at hand. He discovered his beer was empty and put the can aside, turning back to find Sheppard holding out a second. He nodded his thanks and the two of them popped open their cans together.

"So Jennifer's just fine, thanks to me, and disaster was diverted, also thanks to me, and only one person was seriously hurt and that wasn't in any way my fault at all. Mission accomplished, satisfactory conclusion, yet the IOA and Woolsey are intending to review my status here! It doesn't even make any sense! What the hell is the matter with them? None of this crap even happened on Atlantis!"

He turned expectantly to Sheppard, who always had the answers on those extremely rare occasions when Rodney himself didn't.

Sheppard grimaced, looking down at his can of beer. He spoke slowly, like he was picking his words carefully. "I gather they're concerned about the one-life-versus-many thing."

Rodney blinked in surprise. "The-- What? What on earth are you talking about?"

Sheppard looked up into his eyes. "At the end there, when the building was about to be torn apart by the tornadoes and everybody in it could've died, you left Tunney to work out the solution by himself while you went after Keller."

"Well, yes, but I'd told him the plan. And he wasn't alone; Bill Nye was helping him."

Sheppard's face scrunched. "I thought Bill Nye was an engineer, not a physicist?"

Rodney waved a hand. "Yes, yes, but, as he said himself, he knows math. He could check for errors as Tunney worked."

Sheppard pursed his lips. "You said in your report Tunney wasn't sure he'd be able to figure out how to open the second space-time bridge."

"Well, he did _finally_ admit that I'm smarter than he is, but he managed." He grimaced. "Fortunately for all of us."

Sheppard was quiet. When Rodney glanced at him, Sheppard was putting his can of beer down on his other side before turning back to him. Sheppard caught him looking and gave him a smile that didn't touch his eyes.

Sheppard's voice was mild, uninflected. "There was a chance he might not manage it in time, though, right? Because he isn't as smart as you, and sure as hell not as experienced as you are with all this space-matter shit or working under pressure, so he might've run into a problem he didn't have the time or brainpower to figure out. With only the help of an engineer who worked on a kids' show."

Rodney felt the ground shifting under him, only even worse than in Woolsey's office because Sheppard was the solidest ground he knew. _Sheppard_ \--

Sheppard's steady eyes on him looked dulled with weariness, without a trace of a smile now.

"A chance Tunney would fail? Of course! There's always a chance things won't work out the way you plan, especially with a plan cobbled together in the heat of an emergency. For fuck's sake, you know that as well as I do. But Tunney _did_ it, which is the point! He managed to code the second bridge, managed not to fuck it up, had Nye to check his math, and it--" he lifted both hands, only distantly registering the wet splash of beer soaking through his pants "--worked. It _worked_.

"So, yeah, there was, as always, a chance it wouldn't work, but Jennifer...had no chance. No time for delay."

He couldn't get it, couldn't see why Sheppard would be-- Oh!

He smiled, spontaneous and quick. "So, playing Devil's advocate, hmm, Sheppard? Parroting Woolsey's arguments the way the IOA will when I meet with them?"

Sheppard gave him an answering grin, equally brief, before his face fell back into its tired tightness. "Actually, I kind of see where Woolsey and the IOA are coming from on this one."

Air whooshed out of him the way it did when Ronon slapped him in the gut with a stick during practice. His vision darkened around the edges before everything around him snapped into preternatural sharpness.

"You agree with Woolsey."

Sheppard rubbed the back of his neck, one of his nervous tics. Rodney cataloged it with narrowed eyes, his mind falling into the rigorous, calculating boundaries of scientific analysis.

"Rodney, there were ninety-three people in that building. You left Tunney to try to implement the fix by himself, if he could, while you left to save one person."

He kept his anger contained, letting it show only in his clipped voice. "Yes, and if Tunney had failed, Jennifer and I would also have died, in case that little detail has escaped your notice. I was gambling with our lives as well in leaving Tunney to handle it. So, just possibly, my judgment was that he could handle it, hmm?"

Sheppard's mouth twitched in a painful smile. "Rodney--"

"What are you saying, Sheppard? That my judgment is compromised because of my feelings for Jennifer? That I can't be trusted to make the right decisions anymore?"

Sheppard met his eyes. "Yeah. That's what I'm seeing here."

"That's insane. I expect this kind of bullshit from the IOA, maybe even Woolsey, but you _know me_. When have I ever let you down?" His control slipped a tad. "I mean, since Doranda, at least, which was years ago now--"

"Look." Sheppard bit his lip, somehow looking impossibly both too old and too young at the same time, like he existed in his own mixed-up space-time bubble. "I've trusted you implicitly for ages, Rodney. Since, yeah, we got past the Doranda mess. I've known I could trust you to...pull out those last-minute miracle saves, to work through disasters and bullets and volcanoes exploding and Wraith darts overhead and whatever the hell we face out there. But now--"

"But now you don't." His voice was flat in his ears. He was only aware of dropping the beer can into the water when his stiff fingers spasmed.

"Now--I'm not sure. I don't know what you'll do if a similar situation comes up--"

He barked a laugh. "Similar situation? Are you fucking kidding me? How the hell can that statement even make sense to you? God, you know what? Just forget it."

He scrambled gracelessly to his feet, but Sheppard was there before him; of course he was, bounced upright and waiting, standing in his path. Fortunately, Sheppard didn't try to touch him, but Rodney crossed his arms to keep from punching him anyway.

Sheppard spoke in a rush, forceful and intense and leaning toward Rodney. "Just listen a minute, okay? Just say Keller's with us on a mission, or we're off-world with her on one of her medical trips. And say something happens, something that puts everyone in danger, but Keller is off somewhere in specific danger of her own. How can I be sure you won't choose to save her rather than Teyla and Ronon, and maybe a bunch of marines whose names you won't even know, and maybe some primitive village with no tech to offer, no particular knowledge or importance, just a bunch of strangers?"

"This is ripe, coming from the man who got sent to Antarctica for going against orders to try to save his pals!"

Sheppard flinched at the acid in his voice, and mean pleasure made Rodney exult. He was goddamned fucking _delighted_ because anger was keeping the pain at bay.

Sheppard kept his voice low, urgency and reluctance warring to make it sound growly. "I didn't risk anyone else; just me." He took a breath. "All I'm saying is that love makes a difference. There're reasons the military has regs against fraternization."

Rodney freed a hand to flail it in the air. "Which doesn't apply to two civilians!"

Sheppard held his eyes. "When you're on my team and in the field, you're not just a civilian. You know that, Rodney."

Silence blanketed them, deep and suffocating. Rodney tried to catch his breath, failing once before managing it. He was standing so close to Sheppard he could see each individual hair in Sheppard's stubble, could smell the faint tang of Sheppard's sweat under the scent of the Athosian soap Sheppard favored. His eyes darted to Sheppard's mouth as Sheppard licked his dry lips, then he locked eyes with Sheppard again.

"You want me off your team."

Sheppard huffed a humorless laugh. "Hell, no, that's the last thing I want." A deep line like a wound appeared between his brows. "But you're in love with her. Right?"

He was shaking his head before he realized it. "I don't know. I think....maybe? But this was only our first date! I just--"

_I don't know what I would've done if I'd lost you._

He looked away from Sheppard's strained, knowing eyes as exhaustion of his own slammed into him with the force of Tunney's tornadoes.

"We could manage it." He'd be damned if he'd stick to thinking within the IOA's and Woolsey's--and Sheppard's, hell--black-and-white boxes. Fuck that. "We can arrange things so Jennifer and I don't go on missions together, then your ridiculous hypothetical situation won't ever come up."

Sheppard was quiet long enough to raise Rodney's hackles. Sheppard looked as stripped with pain as that time he'd been attacked by tentacles when Jennifer was....

When Sheppard finally spoke, his raw voice merely echoed the words already running on loop through Rodney's mind: "The whole expedition's a mission. If it became a choice between saving Keller or saving Atlantis--"

He waved a hand, helpless, and Sheppard mercifully shut up.

"I get the picture."

Then, because it fucking _hurt_ and he couldn't help it, he'd never pretended to be anything but a jerk, he added, "Thanks, John, I always knew I could count on you," and walked away.

:::::::

He spent a half-hour in his quarters. Washed his face; tried to rinse the bitter taste out of his mouth, but that was a flop. Like his life, apparently; one big ironic joke.

He'd lived his whole life in a state of compromise, but he'd apparently become complacent over the past five years, letting himself feel more secure in what he'd helped create here than he'd ever felt before. Atlantis was his, as much as it was anybody's; more, for fuck's sake. He knew the city better than anyone else. More than that, his efforts and _his_ genius had honed it into the magnificent, powerful entity it presently was.

Atlantis was more than the structure, though, but that was his, too: his team; his people. Colleagues, friends. Possibly even a family of sorts, though he wasn't any kind of expert on families, at least the non-dysfunctional sort. He pulled the framed diplomas off his wall with savage jerkiness to defy his fingers' trembling. Somehow he'd grown so close to his team that the connections felt more visceral than his ties to Jeannie, like they were more of a family than he'd ever known before.

But he'd made his compromises to have Atlantis and his team, these friends, and to work with scientists like Radek and Coleman and Simpson. He'd had to sacrifice his professional reputation outside the tiny, closed world of the SGC. Tyson and Nye's amused disinterest-- _We had it on good authority that you were dead_ \--and Tunney's outright disdain were a small price to pay for galaxies wheeling at his feet.

Now, though, it seemed he had to choose again, but in reverse: Give up the large for the small. Atlantis and his team or Jennifer.

He threw the last picture onto the pile on his bed and snorted a laugh. Sheppard's hypothetical in action, apparently.

On his way to Woolsey's office, he tapped his radio and arranged to swing by and see Jennifer. He didn't bother with a written resignation; he'd have a ton of papers to sign later. Woolsey stood up, frowning and apparently shocked; he tried to speak, but Rodney waved him off.

"Sheppard made your position crystal clear. He's no Ronon, but he has his own deftness with a knife." He felt chill satisfaction picturing Sheppard's face when Woolsey repeated that comment; but the chill gave way to a bone-deep cold and he left, ignoring Woolsey's calling his name behind him.

Jennifer was shocked, too. She stared at him wide-eyed as he gave her the bullet-points.

"Rodney--"

"So it comes down to a choice," he hurried on. "And when I think about losing you, it's worse than--" He blinked, some of his furious focus deserting him. "It feels-- I don't know, just...not...."

She pulled his head down. Her lips were the only heat he could feel, and she was the one warming him up now, Jennifer the one with an ax cutting through the ice trapping him. He drew in a breath filled with her scent, airier and more elusive than Sheppard's; she smelled of Earth soap, of Earth disinfectants. He'd never noticed the distinction before, that Sheppard smelled of Pegasus while Jennifer smelled of...home.

Or what would be his home once more. Best he start thinking about it that way again.

"I'll need a few days to hand off my research--"

He winced even as he tightened his clutch on her. "You don't have to leave, too."

She rolled her eyes. "Of course we're going together!" She slapped him lightly on the arm, then pulled him close and let him cling to her as long as he needed.

:::::::

It took an absurd amount of time to extricate themselves from the SGC, especially considering he was doing precisely what they'd claimed to have wanted--except none of the idiots had apparently ever thought he'd make the choice he did.

He suspected Sheppard was the only person who'd known exactly what would happen.

His last view of Sheppard, looking aged and tired and hollowed out inside, haunted him at odd, inconvenient moments, but he was as clinically precise as Jennifer with a scalpel in cutting the image out of his mind each time it recurred. One day, he was sure, he'd manage to eradicate the last bit of the tumor; and he could live with the scars and the nerve damage.

He and Jennifer chose San Francisco to make their home, where the weather was acceptable and the sea at hand. Jennifer focused on building a practice and decorating their house perched over the ocean while Rodney poured his energy into writing papers and forgetting. Isolating theories he could publish without violating his agreements with the SGC was tricky, but it was the easier task.

They made love in a room smelling of cedar and salt water under skylights aglitter with constellations that were old friends Rodney strove to make into beloved familiars again. If the skin on his arms sometimes prickled with goose-flesh when he looked up from the balcony he'd arrayed with telescopes and saw only one moon...well, San Francisco nights could be chilly. And if he and Jennifer made love less often under their starry ceiling as fall passed into winter, and spent less of their free time together, that was the nature of relationships, as he understood them. Just another of the compromises of life and career.

Plus, he was a busy man, of course, as was Jennifer. Well, a busy woman. They were both very busy people.

He woke from jumbled dreams of incense and Teyla's melodic voice, of the swift silver flash of a knife in Ronon's hand and Ronon's deep laugh mingling with the sweet hard rhythm of Teyla's sticks, the whirl of her shining hair, bright as Atlantis under the twin moons. He'd leave the bed and work for a few hours until he was chilled through and grounded enough to lie down again beside Jennifer's earthly warmth and feel he was whole enough, not in pieces.

He didn't dream of Sheppard. He just kept plying the scalpel and ignoring the scars and the creeping loss of sensation.

:::::::

"Dr. Coleman has adapted well to her new duties." Teyla pushed her plate aside and inhaled the scent of her tea. "She handled the situation on Denarai with excellent poise."

"Yeah, she pulled our asses out of the fire." Ronon was lounging sideways at the table to give his long legs room. "Almost as good as McKay."

He froze as soon as the words slipped out and turned to meet a wary look in Teyla's eyes. He shrugged; they couldn't avoid the subject forever.

"I miss him," he said bluntly. "Dr. Coleman's good with the science, but she's not as entertaining as McKay--or as gullible."

Teyla's laughter had only a hint of strain evident in it. "Dr. Coleman is certainly less rewarding to tease."

"That was half the fun of missions with McKay." He was going to head to the gym soon, channel some of his restless sense of loss into something useful as he did every afternoon they weren't on a mission. He jiggled his foot. "He could at least write and let us know he's okay."

Teyla's smile faded. "Yes. Though I expect the SGC would let us know if anything happened to him."

McKay was alone on that vast teeming planet of his. His choice and his world. Stupid to keep thinking of McKay as alone in an alien place without anyone to watch his back. Except Keller, but she wasn't trained for it, unless it was a medical thing. He didn't blame McKay for making the choice he had; he'd tried to do the same himself once. He'd chosen Melena over staying to fight for Sateda to the death, tried to get her to leave with him, and had only stayed at the end because she died.

Dr. Coleman was working fine with them on missions, but she wasn't team. He was pretty sure she never would be. They were just borrowing her when they went through the gate; she lived her own life the rest of the time. Her own friends, people she worked with--maybe a lover, who knew.

He shrugged away the gloominess. "I hope it was worth it to him." He meant it, though maybe it sounded harsher than he'd intended.

Teyla smiled wryly. "I, too, hope he and Jennifer are happy."

Sheppard, staring out the window, his eyes blank mirrors reflecting the golden glint of the sun-washed towers, didn't say anything.


End file.
